Sunday, September 8, 2013

The crisis in Egypt: Notes from Rabaa al-Adawiya

Rabaa al-Adawiya protestors

This post was submitted by a guest contributor who prefers to remain anonymous.

In
response to the events of June 30th and the subsequent actions of
the Egyptian military, sit-ins were held in Rabaa Al-Adawiya (Rabi'a al-Adawiya) in Nasr City and al-Nahda
in Giza for a period of over 40 days.

Accurate depictions of what was actually
occurring in the sit-ins were hard to come by as the government seemed to make
efforts to portray the sit-ins in a negative light and the protesters attempted
to appeal to the international media with possibly skewed depictions of what
was really going on inside the camps.

The truth is usually somewhere in
between. After feeling that I was unable to assess the sit-ins from news
reports alone, I decided to visit Rabaa Al-Adaweya on the last day of Ramadan,
one week before the sit-in was dispersed.

I arrived at the Rabaa Al-Adeweya sit-in around 5pm
with a friend whose father was in the sit-in. I wore a full black abaya, hijab,
underscarf, and sleeves and could have easily been mistaken for an Egyptian. At
the entrance, we encountered a sex segregated security checkpoint. A young,
smiling woman searched my bag, gave me a pat-down, and checked my ID. As she
viewed my French passport, she continued to smile and made conversation with
me, attempting to figure out why I was there. After explaining that I had lived
in Cairo for many years she sent me on my way.

As my friend and I began to walk through the sit-in,
young men kept spraying us with water because it was hot. My friend became annoyed,
as might occur when one continues to be unexpectedly sprayed in the face, and started
to demand that they give him the spray bottle so he could spray them back in
the face. The sit-in consisted of a sea of tents lined up in the form of a
makeshift city. There was ample room to navigate the streets dividing the
tents, and the level of organization was striking.

There were a few men near
the entrance lined up with hard hats and large sticks, but those were the only
type of “weapons” I encountered throughout my visit. The atmosphere was almost
festive, with swings and playground equipment for children, street vendors
selling clothes, accessories, and tea, and later in the day, my friend even purchased
a stencil set from a vendor.

The sit-in was very clean and there were sweepers moving
around maintaining the area. In fact, the Raba'a sit-in was cleaner than many
areas of Cairo, though I would not say that that is a very high standard to which to
be held. There were security personnel with orange vests, hard hats, and large
flashlights walking around. As a woman, I felt relaxed, as there was no
harassment or fights in the camp.

All the tents had posters hanging on them in
Arabic, English, French, and a few in German and even Russian. There were
posters depicting Morsi, which read, “No to the coup,” in Arabic and a poster
with a woman saying, “Killing won’t silence my voice,” in English. There were
other posters with the words “We want the president and parliament,” “Anti-coup,”
“Where is my ballot?” and “The revolution continues,” referring to January 25,,
2011. I even saw a sign with an Otpor fist.

There were also a number of
posters of martyrs with the face of the martyr in normal times and then another
of the martyr on a respirator or dead and mutilated. One poster that caught my
eye depicted a number of dead individuals lined up and said, “Paid for by U.S.
tax dollars.” Young men were also walking around with posters on sticks, some
with faces of martyrs on them. Throughout the sit-in one could observe many Egyptian
flags.

When my companion and I arrived at the stage, the
crowd was sex segregated. Nearby, I encountered a hanging effigy of the
minister of interior (my friend identified who it was supposed to be) and a
donkey was walking around with a boot hanging around his neck. Young children
were standing on the stage in a row singing songs and later they remained on
the stage while a boy around five years old took the microphone to lead
anti-American and anti-government chants. One of the chants in the sit-in was,
“Get out get out military rule.”

We then made our way to my friend’s father’s
tent. The tent was decorated with Sponge Bob and Mickey Mouse long balloons,
which I thought was a little strange when later we started praying and we were
praying in the direction of the balloons. In Islam, a person is not supposed to
pray with pictures in front of him so that it does not seem as if he is praying
to the picture instead of to God.

The tent was all male, five Muslim
Brotherhood members and the rest all independents. My friend whispered to me
not to shake his father’s hand, as many conservative Muslim men will not touch
a woman who is not a family member. The men of the tent were reserved but
welcoming, and quickly provided a chair for me. I had a quick chat with my
friend’s father about being French and converting to Islam, and then I read Qur’an in Arabic until it was time to break the fast.

The people walking around Rabaa looked like anyone
walking down the streets of Cairo. There were men with beards, men without
beards, women in niqab, women in hijab and abaya, and women in regular skirts,
shirts and hijab. I only saw one or two women without head coverings. There
were a number of couples strolling, as were families, children, and groups of
men and groups of women. They looked mostly middle and lower class, but of
course I cannot be sure.

When it was time to break our fast, we had dates,
water and juice, and then all of Rabaa prayed simultaneously in the tents
before eating the iftar meal, in which Muslims break the daily Ramadan fast. I prayed behind the men in the tent, but in many
tents that had both sexes, women and men were separated by a curtain. Each tent
was like a mosque. One had to take off his shoes before entering. That way,
people could pray in the tent. We had chicken and rice for iftar. I brought
sweets and there were grapes for dessert. We also had tea and mango juice. It felt
like a normal iftar I would have had anywhere in Cairo.

I did not want to ask too
many questions (for personal safety reasons), but I did ask one man whether or
not he thought Morsi had done a good job as president. He told me Morsi did not
have enough time in office to prove himself. He also spoke about “Islamic
democracy,” but I did not have time to ask him how he defined the term. My
friend’s father also mentioned something about the protest being a fight for
religion. When we realized that the 'Eid had arrived, fireworks were set off
all over the camp.

Though I was dreading the inevitable, eventually
after five hours I had use the bathroom, so we went on a half hour quest
for a toilet. As my friend and I walked around, I felt like I was in a fair.
One tent even had a sign posted that said, “Artists for Morsi.” I realized the
protest site reached right up to the sides of residential buildings. The
buildings seemed to be closed up and I wondered if people were trapped inside
or if they had moved out. Radio Shack, a bank, and other businesses were closed, but I did not see any evidence of damage to the stores.

At one point we
walked by a tent that seemed to be holding some kind of press conference. One
of the women sitting at the table was not wearing a hijab. I personally did not
see any TVs in the camp and it seemed that most information was coming from a
man speaking on a loud speaker who, according to my friend, talked 24 hours per
day. The man on the speaker kept speaking about legitimacy and democracy.

While we had to enter Rabaa through a checkpoint,
when my friend’s father drove us home, we just walked through the protest and
left through a space between two tents to his car, which was waiting right
outside. A lot of people would go to work during the day, then go to Rabaa
before iftar and stay for the evening or overnight. That meant that the person in
traffic next to me or the man or woman at the grocery store might also be a
Rab'aa protester.

When I was in Rabaa, one man said he had one son in the
military, one in the Rabaa protests, and one in the anti-Morsi protests.
Another man I interviewed on another day who participated in the anti-Morsi
protests said his mother is Salafi, his father is pro-Mubarak, and he protested
on January 25, 2011 and on June 30, 2013. What can be seen is that it is not
different groups of people who are divided in Egypt, it is different people
within the same family, apartment building, or community.

The purpose of this piece is not to paint the Rabaa
sit-in in a rosy light nor to demonize it. My aim is simply to depict what I
saw and to try to understand why the people were there. While I engaged in
limited conversation, from the people with whom I did speak and the posters I
saw, my initial impression was that there were different people there for
different reasons.

One line that may be drawn between the 30 June
protesters and those attending the Rabaa sit-in is different definitions of
democracy. While there were many demonstrators on June 30th protesting Egypt's deteriorating economic conditions, the Muslim Brotherhood controlling the government, which
was not inclusive, or the many embarrassing decisions made by the president, some of
the protesters were in the streets because they saw democracy as a process, and
though Morsi was elected, his rule was not democratic.

Many protesters in Rabaa
seemed to see democracy as elections, but not necessarily a process. One man I
interviewed who was pro-Morsi, but not at the sit-in, said he voted for Morsi
and then voted “yes” in the constitutional referendum because, if he voted for
Morsi, he had to support everything he did. When I interviewed some members of
the lower classes who were anti-Morsi, they defined democracy as “when their
lives get better.”

In terms of the less educated members of Egyptian society
who are more concerned with putting food on the table, I think some were swayed
by the pro-Morsi camp and others by the anti-Morsi camp that their lives would
get better one way or the other. In some ways they are the same people. To
understand democracy as a process, it takes education, particularly education
on what democracy means. Among the lower classes, I have found few definitions of
democracy that go beyond freedom of expression and fairness. In reference to
the man at Rabaa who spoke about Islamic democracy, I am not sure exactly what
the term means, but I do not think it means what many common definitions of
democracy imply. It seems that Islamic democracy leans more toward an Islamic
state, rather than democracy.

The sign I saw that said, “The revolution continues”
points to different interpretations of the January 2011 protests. As
can be seen from many revolutions in history, protesters may agree that they
want to remove the regime, but they usually do not agree on what should come
next. While “bread, freedom, and social justice” was the 2011
Revolution's slogan, there does not seem to be consensus on how to achieve these
demands. For many at Rabaa, Islam was the answer (Islam al-hall).

Those who did not understand
why the members of the Rabaa sit-in did not leave when asked to by the government
and even remained when there was a clear threat of violence by the police
against protesters, forget that many at the sit-in also protested on January 28,
2011 and the following days. If they did not leave Tahrir during the Revolution
when the government asked them to leave and police were shooting at them, why
would they leave Rabaa under the same threats, particularly if in their minds
they were continuing the Revolution? Of course particularly with Islamists,
there is often the additional promise of martyrdom.

Finally, while there were many at Rabaa who were
members of Islamist groups or who supported the Islamist agenda, there were others
who simply wanted to know where their vote had gone. For those who see
democracy as elections, rather than as a process, they may have voted for
Islamists in the parliamentary elections, and then the parliament was
dissolved, and they may have voted for Morsi, and then he was deposed. There
were some at Rabaa who may have just been unhappy about the Egyptian population
not giving Morsi his four years and that every time Islamists were elected,
somehow they were removed.

In sum, I want to emphasize that this piece is not a
justification for or an attack on the Rabaa protest, but is a description of what I
saw and some conclusions I have made. I never saw any weapons in the sit-in and
others I have talked to did not either. At the same time, many journalists
reported that torture was taking place under the stage, there were men with
weapons in specific areas, and dead tortured bodies were found near the
sit-ins.

I do not dispute these reports, but from my own experience, I wonder
if families with children knew of the violence that was going on or whether the
violence and weapons were concealed from the average protester. If I had
attended the sit-in everyday with the experience I had, I might not have
believed that there were weapons in the camp and may have thought that the news
reports were bogus. However, there were films of speeches made on the stage
that implied violence. Without further interviews, we will not know what the
members of sit-ins knew or did not know and they may not be inclined to admit
to knowing about weapons or expressions of violence if they were aware.

All I know is what I saw at Rabaa, that
approximately 1,000 pro-Morsi protesters were killed by security forces in a
week starting seven days after I visited Rabaa, and that every week now there
are reports of bombings, attempted bombings, and armed attacks on state
institutions,the military and security forces, and Egypt's infrastructure.

About Me

Eric Davis is Executive Director, MA Program in Political Science - Concentration in United Nations and Global Policy Studies, Professor of Political Science and the former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. He is author of CHALLENGING COLONIALISM: BANK MISR AND EGYPTIAN INDUSTRIALIZATION, 1920-1941 (Princeton University Press, 1983; Institute for Arab Development, Beirut, 1986, and Dar al-Sharook, Cairo, 2009); STATECRAFT IN THE MIDDLE EAST: OIL, HISTORICAL MEMORY AND POPULAR CULTURE (University Presses of Florida, 1993); MEMORIES OF STATE: POLITICS, HISTORY AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN MODERN IRAQ (University of California Press, 2005; Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2008; and the forthcoming, TAKING DEMOCRACY SERIOUSLY IN IRAQ (Cambridge University Press). Currently, he is writing a book on the Islamic State and the changing modalities of terrorism in the Middle East. He can be contacted at davis@polisci.rutgers.edu and @NewMidEast